Forza Motorsport 7 (Xbox One) Review

The Forza saga continues with Forza Motorsport 7. It has been out for a little while, but we wanted to get some teeth in to it before coming to any conclusions.

Let’s start with the worst aspect – too many races are at night. Waaaay too many. The graphics look gorgeous, but it’s like the developers are looking to make things deliberately more difficult. So, let’s turn the lights off. And that’s a shame. All those wonderful graphical advances are turned to black. I have not had a single car yet that has headlights powerful enough to let me know where the road is.

I know pretty much every track like the proverbially rear end of a hand. But I don’t know Virginia which makes an appearance here. Having played it for hours now, I still don’t know Virginia because most of the races are in the dark, and most of the turns are taken as a result of the handy rewind facility still here. And that’s annoying.

Racing? Brilliant. Menus? Fine. Load times? Improved. Variation? Not much. Gone is that roulette style flashing boxes to pick up bonuses. The idea is still there, but now you choose from a new outfit (what’s the point?) some money or a free or discounted car. And that’s the only thing you will be interested in.

The competition to win the Forza Cup seems painfully short. And there doesn’t seem to be as many races to do for fun. The game’s progression is nice, you are not backed into a corner where you need a new car, but don’t have the money for it, nor any means to raise the cash. We like that. Another well known racing game has done that to me a few times.

I am not fully sure about this, but there doesn’t seem to be many endurance races – done one, haven’t seen another. BUT, you do now finally have the option to run longer races, up to around 20 minutes each, which is great as we still don’t get to do a qualifying lap, unless I missed it.

So you always start mid-field, and if you only have two or three laps to win, you either put the competition on complete wuss level, or barrel through the opposition like a pinball.
Talking of which, bowling is back and so are the gates. Time to scrap these utterly pointless and annoying gimmicks.

One final moan, and this is perhaps becasue I am on the Xbox and not a PC, but the LMP cars are next to impossible to drive with a pad. Even with all the assists switched on, and the rivals on that wuss level again, I could only just come in first. Perhaps with a wheel they are better.

The dynamic weather is nice with dry lines appearing during a race with some of the 700 plus cars available. Those graphics can be seen at 60fps and true 4K resolution in HDR, but you will need an Xbox One X to obtain this graphic level.

That lets things happen like the windscreen wiper can gently flap about, clocks work, game music can be easily turned off, other people’s tune ups are easily obtained, sound is great, and it is not entirely arcade, but we still sometimes see just one car hurtle off into the distance rather that the race being more of a pack and buying bonus crates is daft.